In 1617, the college was in condition of being admitted as a house by the province of the Dominican fathers in the islands. In 1620, having been provided with professors, it opened its halls to the Filipino youth without distinction of race. King Don Felipe IV took the college under his special protection by a royal decree of November 27, 1623. Some years later, its royal protector obtained from his Holiness, Pope Innocent X, the fitting bull given November 20, 1644, by which the said college was erected into a university, and the latter decorated with the honorable titles of Royal and Pontifical. By a royal decree of May 17, 1680, it was admitted solemnly under the royal protection, and his Majesty, the king, was declared its patron. By another royal decree of December 7, 1781, the statutes approved by the government of the colony, October 20, 1786, were formed. It continued and is at present in charge of its founders, the learned and virtuous Dominican fathers. That royal college and pontifical university has a rector religious, and all the professors except those of medicine and pharmacy are also Dominicans. The studious youth who saw in the new center of teaching the glorious future which invited them by the golden laurels of learning, came in crowds to fill the cloisters of the new university, which, narrow and reduced for containing within their halls so many young men desirous of learning and instruction, begged the aid of another institution which should share with the university in the task of the teacher. The time urged, the necessity was pressing, there was no time to think of the construction of a new edifice for circumstances did not permit it. Then there was fitted up as a college the school of primary instruction instituted by the illustrious Spaniard, Don Gerónimo Guerrero, of glorious memory, whose name should pass to posterity so that he may be blessed eternally by Spaniards and Filipinos, since he dedicated his wealth, his labors, and his care to their instruction and education, not only instructing them in the primary letters, but also supporting them and clothing them with his own resources and with the alms which other charitable persons who were desirous of contributing in so deserving a work gave him. The efforts of that remarkable Spaniard deserved the protection of the government of the mother country and the support of the Council of Indias. The king remunerated them by granting him an encomienda in Ilocos as an aid in that blessed establishment, and God rewarded it by conceding him the religious vocation which induced him to take the habit in the order of the Dominican fathers. He ceded to the latter his schoolhouse, his encomienda, and all his goods, with the sole condition that the said fathers were to take charge of the gratuitous education and teaching of the poor Spanish and native boys. The condition having been accepted by the Dominican fathers the schoolhouse of the worthy